It does not mean they have "rest mass", but they do actually have "mass", m=E/c2, that should create gravity around the photon ( if gravity is such as thing that gets created and is present around an object, and it's not just a straight "instantaneous action at a distance" between two objects. now my head is starting to hurt)
Just because there are very few blood types out there, and it has something to do with heredity, it does not mean that there are only those few genetic variations of people, because within each blood type there are many different looking people out there - can you tell someone's blood type with high accuracy just by looking at a picture of their face? I don't think that's possible. Same goes for other genetic markers, such as mitochondrial DNA that strictly follows the maternal side. But life with bloodtype, just because your mitochondrial DNA is the same it does not mean you're closely related - well, it's a much tighter determining factor than blood type, but there are other things that matter too, such as the paternal side genes. Mitochondrial DNA only comes from the maternal side and you can trace ancestry along maternal sides that way, skin color, and beigeness, for instance, depends on both parents, and I think blood type does too. So good luck messing around with family trees and tracing your ancestry very far into the past. It's kind of hard to keep track of 9,007,199,254,740,992 different people 53 generations ago, especially the intricate inbreeding relationships when different generations slip in time against each other, and get out of sequence, so someone who's your great-great-great-great-grandfather's great-great-granddaughter might be your wife and you wouldn't even know it.
I have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, 32 great-great-great-grandparents, and so on. I was discussing a while ago that 53 generations ago (perhaps 1325=53*25 years ago, if a generation takes 25 years to cycle) I had 2^53=9,007,199,254,740,992 different ancestors, if there was no inbreeding. There was obviously some inbreeding, because even today there are only about 7,000,000,000 people on the planet, give or take. But amongst those 9,007,199,254,740,992 people 1325 years ago there is a high chance that some were from Europe, some from Africa, some from Asia, but there is a much lesser chance that some were Native Americans, or native Australians, or the now extinct, native Tasmanians. I probably share quite a bit of common ancestry with Native Americans too, probably even more than with subSaharan Africans, but it has to go back to a time before they crossed the Behring Strait between Siberia and Alaska, unless some intermixed with Eskimos up north, who in turn got around to the other continents and transported ancestry that way, after the Behring strait was crossed. My most distant relatives are probably the native Australians, but even they came from Africa less than 200,000 years ago, because that's when modern humans first appeared.
If they can pinpoint exactly which village you came from, then you have a severe inbreeding problem, because every village should have people from hundreds of other villages, and such variation shouldn't be duplicated from village to village, so on a country level, out of say 10-50 million people you're probably talking at least half a million different villages they could have come from. Everyone's unique, everyone has a different fingerprint - unless they are genetically identical twins. People will sometimes prefer their very own kind, but sometimes someone very distant as an inbreeding fighting measure. Who you find physically attractive is a very subtle process, as you both are responsible for yourself first, then your family, then your kind, but you have to protect yourself, your family and your kind from inbreeding defects too. Everyone is responsible for themselves, if you take care of yourself, then I don't have to, you're helping me out a lot by taking care of yourself. If you take care of your family and kids, then I don't have to, you're helping me out a lot again. If you take care of your own kind, then I don't have to, you're helping me out a lot again. Am I my brother's keeper? Sometimes I cannot afford to be. I cannot expect you to care about someone else's children more, or even equally, to how you care about your own. If you disagree, we have a whole lot of court cases where paternity issues are fought, and all you gotta do is show up and offer that they don't need to fight in court, because you will accept the child support deductions from your paycheck, for millions of cases that happen. Or if you cannot accept a million deductions, just do one such case. Chances are you will not go for it, and be altruistic like that to a random stranger. Most people that adopt a child as their own, they don't just get a paycheck deduction, but they get human contact out of it, so in a sense it's selfish. However there are lots of catholic charities that collect donations for say, kids in the Philippines, and the people get a picture of the child in exchange, but you can only do that if you take care of your own turf first, I also cannot expect you to care more about me, than yourself. Though there are martyrs, heroes, kamikaze's, who will take care of their kind before taking care of themselves, but in a sense they are taking care of themselves better by taking care of their kind, than if they took care of themselves themselves. Your ultimate kind is human, and we could even get as specieist as saying that we'd be willing to see every other creature and species disappear if that saved humans, but we would probably not be racist enough to say that we'd be willing to see every other human race disappear to save our own, or every o
Also, while some bumble-bees and wild strains of bees have very low family sizes, most domesticated bee hives have on the order of 50,000 individuals, which creates a society a lot more complex than the natural "hive-size" for ape or human societies. Humans have the mental capacity to handle on the order of 200-800 people at once, and there are very few villages around the globe that have larger sizes than that. Cities arose only in advanced stages of civilization, such as Babylon, but the bulk of the population used to be rural up until a century ago, and only recently have humans become mainly urbanized. Even with local market-town cities where the various villages interact and exchange goods, ideas and non-inbreeding genes, the moral code and ethics is still dominated by the villages and cities are oppressed by it. Under such circumstances, with everyone's hive limited to 200 or so people, crime is very low. Even inside cities people naturally develop hives of that size that interact dynamically with each other on many fronts, but those cities that lack mechanisms for such 200 person collectives - be it a prison environment, a mental institution, or even a steady job - probably have a lot of crime. One wonders how ants and bees have the mental capacity to handle societies of tens of thousands of individuals, and the common answer is that they don't, they only have the "scent" capacity, semaphores and signals that trigger automatic behavior that they are unable to go against. Not following the law, such as crossing a red light, is genetically impossible for ants, termites and bees, but it's very easy for humans to do, laws and rights and police are smoke and mirrors when it comes to humans or even dogs, and only the village is able to beat everyone into submission. Though there are crazy people who cannot be helped no matter what and instead we lock them up to keep everyone else safe from them, the bulk of the crime committed is a failure of a village, and cannot be blamed on economic conditions, because there are lots of extremely poor but well functioning villages around the world with zero crime.
The queen's gotta be an exception to the defecation flight requirement, as she only leaves the hive when mating, as mating has to happen out in the open, and only the drones that can chase the queen real high, and do acrobatic maneuvers with her, get to mate with her. Blind drones, defective drones, or unskilled drones at flying don't get very far, as it's very important for the next generation of worker bees to have good navigation and flying abilities. After mating a drone falls to a glorious death. So the queen probably never leaves the hive for defecation, and it must be the attendant bees that feed her the royal jelly that somehow handle her excrement and transport it outside. Also once a queen is failing, such as has run out of sperm reserves after 2 years or so, or lays an inadequate crop of eggs, or who knows what kind of complex reasons, including disturbing pesticides meddling in the decision making process of bees, she may get "balled" and suffocated by her attendants, who, by creating an absence of a queen, and her royal scent decaying from the hive in a matter of hours, automatically drive the rest of the workers to enlarge some existing worker cells, and create new queen candidates, which will fight to the death when they emerge, until one is left. If the workers don't succeed in rearing a new queen, such as all the worker larvae are at too an advanced stage to be fed royal jelly and be turned into queens, or the few queens that do emerge are unable to take the nuptual flight because of bad weather or various other reasons, so after days and weeks of not having a queen or royal scent present in the hive, all the female worker bees' ovaries develop and all of them start laying eggs, but they lack sperm reserves, or biological equipment to store sperm at all, and without sperm every new bee hatchling is a useless drone, and without a functioning queen the whole hive is doomed, because she's the only one who can lay female worker bee eggs, by voluntarily choosing whether to fertilize an egg, or not, and by choosing not to fertilize an egg, she lays a drone, on purpose. How many drones to lay is a very complex decision. But complex decisions is what queen bees are good at..
Actually it still exists, I recently bought 5 1/4" floppies with specifically MS DOS 6.20 on them, as they contain patent infringing Doublespace on them, as opposed to the later released non-infringing Drivespace in MS DOS 6.22. Microsoft paid millions in infringement damages to the appropriate company as a result of the lawsuit, however as Feb 1994 has been over 20 years ago, and patents last only 20 years from the date of filing (used to be 17 years from the date of approval, which resulted in delay tactics of over 10 years or more from date of filing just to get approval as late as possible, and extend the effective patent protection period), so Feb 2014 was 20 years from Feb 1994, the release of MS DOS 6.20, so the patent had to have expired, no matter what, by then. So you're free to use DoubleSpace again, these days. You never know which one is better, Drivespace or Doublespace, as bees don't know which genes are the correct ones in defending against future threats, and create as much genetic variability as possible through creating expensive but otherwise useless drones. They are so expensive to create, keep up and maintain, that sometimes it's not worth it, and end of October/November they get tossed outside the hive by the female workers, and left to die, as they can't take care of themselves. The females will in turn create new drones when Spring is here, but economize the honey stores only on workers and the queen that take care of the hive, and do useful work. Their moral conduct is also to hold in their excrement for the entire winter, and only when spring is here will they have their defecation flights. You never shit inside the hive if you're a bee, it would take too much effort to clean it up, you also can't do it next to the hive, you gotta go some distance before your code of ethics relating to defecation permits such a thing to happen.
So what if you want to prolong the lifetime of an SSD's, and want to use it as a long term backup storage medium that you can bury in your backyard, and only dig it out once a decade to update? Also a decade later writable SSD's may no longer be available, so as you have no clue how many writes and rewrites you will do in the future, what's an efficient strategy, an optimum %fill on these drives? As the future is unknown, you cannot predict this accurately, but it's certainly not 99.9% full, and not 0.01% full, so is 80% filling policy, or 95% or 99.8% fill policy and according purchase of capacity a good strategy?
Exactly - these drives are almost read-only drives, you can write to them a few thousand times, but you should avoid writing to them at all cost, consider them kinda like CD-R's. As they are chip based, and come with built-in wifi, anything you write to them inside a city or anywhere there is wifi present, will be sent through the subliminal wifi network to the powers that be. The only secure way to write to these is in the middle of the desert with nobody around for 100's of miles (but you still got the satellites watching you) or in a deep underground cavern or mine where all electromagnetic (including satellite) waves are blocked out (it's not safe to masturbate in the desert because you can be caught on satellite camera and be posted all over the internet, a mineshaft or deep underwater in a submarine is a lot safer place to do it). You have to be careful with the timestamps though, and stick to something like year 2005 in your computer bios, as there might be a zero day code built into the chip that erases everything in, say, year 2050, then self destructs. Even if you watch your timestamps, the device may have its own clock regardless, and know when 2050 is here even if you don't tell it. The way to deal with that is to "starve" the device of any residual capacitive storage to run a clock from, say freezing it for 20-40 years, at which point its own internal clock should give out due to lack of capacitive battery power and stop counting the progress of time, and when 2050 hits, some of these devices will self destruct, but the deep frozen ones will be behind on their internal clock, and the data can be rescued from them before they self-destruct too. The only secure longterm storage mediums are non-chip based, such as magnetic (floppies, tape) or optical (cd-rw(cr-r ink decays over time or bacteria can chew it up, CDRW is a molten semimetal glass (fuckin telluride, telluride is only found where gold is found, or with high probability only there, and it's super rare, or super dispersed in the environment, hard to extract and get your hands on it), that's only temperature sensitive, but not good food like ink is good food), dvd, etc.) As long as they can't create logic inside magnetic materials, such as magnetic transistors, etc, the data can be kept separated from the logic that acts on it, and there is never a danger of self activating zero day self destruct behavior. By the way floppies have the head rubbing against the disk, and only teflon based floppies should be used. Harddrives have a tiny air-cushion, bernoulli-effect-like, so there is no contact, they are also dust-free, unfortunately they are chip-based, and because of that are not secure. Ideally they should make "removable disk" harddrives, where you can remove the spindle and exchange it between drives, like you can floppies, however the powers that be might want to retain that only for themselves or their military, and the general public only get SSD's, chipped harddrives, chipped flash drives, or floppies and cdrw's. Out of all CDRW's are the best option for Jefferson's yeomans, and not DVD-RW's, as the biggest issue with CD's is head alignment. I used to work at an electronics repair shop as a front desk attendant, and the standard chime I uttered every time someone tried to bring in a CD-player for repair was: "The laser assembly is out of alignment - it costs $80 for a new laser assembly, and you only paid $40 for the CD-player, (or fill in the value, 39, or 44, how much was it? 52? you got ripped off, circuit city sells them for 39 every holiday). So what you wanna do, buy another CD or DVD player, or you want us to look at it and repair it, and charge you the diagnosis fee too?" The laser assembly is always out of alignment, it's always out of friggin alignment, so that brings you back to floppies, the bigger and lower density the better, 80KB 8" being the best, least head alignment or magnetic material error sensitive. Floppies you may also be able to self-produce, and then their short lifetime is not an issue. Having 80KB storage is a whole who
The danger of this may be the reason for the coming apocalypse and technological decline, as God may prefer going back to horses as power sources and monks doing handwriting, as opposed to creating all digesting nanomachines, the way we're headed these days. However the technological descent should be smoothed out a bit, as you should try to save some existing computers and run them for as many hundred years as they will go, before running out of them and being stuck with handwriting only.
Silicon based life might be robots with an artificial intelligence computers, and they need to eat nothing, as they have solar panels to produce electricity directly from sunlight, and are able to live in the vacuum of outer space. If sunlight is not available, then they can use nuclear reactions to produce electricity to power themselves with in the dark.
Glass is already dephlogisticated silicon, but silicon full of phlogiston has been suggested as a commodity energy carrier. On the plus side it's ubiquitous, being the second most common element on Earth after oxygen, but it's not easy to react it back and forth, unless we can find a way, such as an organic fluid with a high redox potential window able to digest solid silicon, and good luck with that, otherwise solid silicon reactions require very high temperatures. The hydride is more reactive, but then storage becomes an issue. There is an optimum balance between storage nonreactivity, and energy conversion ease of reactivity, and gasoline might be a bit on the danger side of ease, but it's the best thing we got as an energy carrier right now. The much more scarce boron has many benefits compared to silicon, but it's very toxic to all chitin based life, and it also has issues of reactivity, but the borohydrides might be pretty usable. Both silicon and boron produce dephlogisticated ash that's a show stopper for car use, unless you toss the ash up in the air like old steam locomotives used to, and spread it all over the cars behind you, in which case boron cannot be but silicon might be. This ash production is opposite of hydrocarbons and ammonia producing only dephlogisticated airs, which can be freely emitted from a car.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... of the 4.6 billion years that the Earth has been circling the Sun, life has been present for 3.6 billion years as single celled organisms, and only 1 billion years ago did multicellular organisms appear, including all visible life-forms, such as plants, animals, etc, 600 million years ago simple animals, only 130 million years ago flowers (flowering trees taking over most lowland forest areas pushing nonflowering conifers up the mountains, btw every flower means a bug, as it's colored to attract a bug as a reproductive vector, and not hose the environment with a gazillion spores like conifers do), and only 20 million years ago great apes, and only 200,000 years ago modern humans, out of Africa. All these multicellular lifeforms, without exception, are inhabited by single celled organisms in symbiotic ways. The variety in single celled lifeforms is tremendous, and so it is in multicellular lifeforms. It is strange that after all this time no single victorious, monopolistic entity arose, such as a uniform, dominant species, a most efficient, most proliferating single celled life form digesting anything and everything around it, but instead genetic variability seems to be actively maintained. Genetic variability is the answer to unknown problems, as if you know what the actual problem or challenge is gonna be, you can choose an optimal solution, but when the problem is unknown, such as the appearance of a new smart predator with unknown tricks, it's not possible to predict what the problems will be, and the next best thing is to provide variety hoping that at least something will make it. The natural progress of things is usually that the rich get richer the poor get poorer, the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker, monopolies naturally arise and dominate and exterminate everything else, but being a mono-culture, they are vulnerable along the lines of the potato-as-most-efficient crop being a mono-culture created the Irish potato famine, so against this natural trend of coalescing toward a vulnerable top dog monopoly situation, there is this active sustenance of variability and keeping anything from becoming a monopoly, you can call it intelligent design, as an external agent meddling with things, or you can say that the bacteria themselves are intelligent(some have rotors) and retain control of multicellular lifeforms including humans, and they meddle in the affairs of humans through mind control, presenting prophecies, test and check human reactions with dreams, create and manage hallucinations, and try to create and sustain variety and balance of power among different lifeforms, and even different human cultures, such as making Joan of Arc put an end to the 100 year war and sustaining the balance of power in the monarchies of Europe, not letting the British crown or later Napoleon take over all power. They are also not omnipotent because they could not save Joan from the fire, from the desperate desire of the clergy to witness a miracle(she has already fulfilled her function), and they stopped messing with prophecies after Mohamed the last prophet of God, as nobody, nobody knows the future, any intellect has some predictive power, such as a cat or monkey able to predict whether a jump from a tree branch will succeed, that's what a brain is for, but having no clue about what happens 10 years from now. Once a prophecy is created it takes a whole lot of effort to fulfill it, and it's not worth it sometimes, and life has to adapt to the new circumstances and forget about the prophecies. New prophecies should be taken as guidelines, but with the understanding that life has to adapt to whatever new circumstances arise. Btw. life may have extraterrestrial origins starting 3.6 billion years ago, and when we terraform Venus, as that is the only planet with the right size for us, not Mars, so we might start with single celled lifeforms to reduce greenhouse effects there, and put an adjustable umbrella b
There was actually some major spy case with data being stored in unused areas of the floppies. As most harddrives and USB key-chain drives are chip-based, and the only chip you can trust is the one that you make, floppies are secure in the sense that they isolate data storage from the logic that could do anything with it. And once one logic fails, such as a floppy drive, you have the option to carry the floppy from it to a different floppy disk but you cannot do that with a harddisk. Optical disks can also be separated from the logic, however the ink based CD-Rs degrade fast over time, but not the RW kind base, calchogenide glass, which does not degrade. I wish they invented some chalcogen glasses that are not scarce-material based. The biggest issue with floppies is constant mechanical wear as the read-write magnetic head touches the disk surface with a given pressure, but because of the low density, floppy head movement errors are tolerable, unlike with optical disks, where tiny laser-head misalignments create a failed read.
I'm a half-ass vegetarian. I don't actively try to eat meat, but I don't have a problem with it, as long as other people have to do the dirty work of killing the meat for food. I'd have a really hard time looking a cow or chicken into the eye, and telling it sorry buddy, you're lunch, as long as there are other things without eyes or a central nervous system to eat, such as chicken eggs for proteins. In dire economic circumstances and heavy hunger it would be easier to look a cow or chicken or deer in the eye and just do it, so one measure of one's luxury is how vegetarian can be afford to be? How much morality can you afford for yourself?Really rich Rajah's in old India could afford to hire people to sweep the ground before them so they don't accidentally step on a bug, and harm another conscious being with eyes and a central nervous system.
Nuclear power is all about safety and security, which are or should be the costliest items on the budget, the fuel is relatively cheap, and processing would be cheap too if it weren't for the safety and security issues. Doing it large-scale in high security lock down zones enhances safety, as opposed to, as the above poster says, trying to keep track of lots of mini-reactors being shipped to many places, fueling hospitals and such, all over the place, getting stolen/lost/loaded on an airplaine and slammed into a building in NY 9/11 style. When there are too many mobile reactors, keeping track of them becomes difficult, and the safety risks are huge. All civil nuclear power should be non-mobile as a first rule. Any nuclear material leaving a high security facility on a train or an arm-guard-cash-truck or in any way is a safety issue.
But there is a need for mobile small scale nuclear power, the most important example being military submarines, which simply cannot function on diesel, as they have to get oxygen from the air, and their tactical situation may require deep underground stays for weeks at a time. Also nuclear fuel needs recharging only every few years, as opposed to every other week with diesel. That's a very important military consideration, as half of all military issues relate to logistics, and supply of materials to the battlefronts. Only nuclear power makes sense for a submarine, and it has to be mobile and small scale. The logistics issue of bi-weekly diesel fuel deliveries also requires carriers to be nuclear powered, needing only a biannual refueling. Do we really need submarines and carriers? Yes. As long as you have a military, sea power is essential, and the battleship is obsoleted by both the airplane carrier and the submarine. Small scale mobile nuclear reactors are an absolute necessity for submarines, not as much a necessity but a very good idea for carriers, and I would even go as far as saying it might also make sense in the future for military airplanes of the slow, long-haul freight kind, which are big like a submarine, and similar but air cooled units could be used in both. Having freight airplanes with guaranteed uptime/availability regardless of availability of diesel can be a lifesaver in the future is diesel prices hit over $20/gal, and the world gets militarily tense over that high price. I mean the $20 in year 2000 US dollar values, not in an inflation world, where, if minimum wage hits $380/hr, and monthly rent is 38,000, and the Dow Jones is at 1,400,000, then $20/gal wouldn't be a big deal, would it.
Besides the military, there are very few civilian requirements for small scale mobile nuclear units, a major hospital being maybe the only such example. A major hospital of at least a certain size should service every area of the country as a last resort to send patients to if power fails to the whole region of the country including the branch hospitals and the major hospital itself. A major hospital should have reserve batteries to last at least 20 minutes, then reserve diesel to last two weeks (when electricity goes out natural gas may still be available indefinitely, so generators based on that should be run before diesel stores are touched, (the same generator should be able to run both diesel and natural gas), but if both electric and natural gas is lost then you need), with ability to request the military to deliver one of these or a couple of these air-cooled airplane-engine units in a high security, heavy military defended way, operated by military personnel until power connections to regular power plants can be reestablished, or if not, indefinitely guarded. The air cooled part is what would take up 95% of space, the reactor itself being very small, as availability of water cooling cannot be guaranteed, the hospital may be lucky to sustain its water supply from local wells, if the water-pipeline/sewer infrastructure also fails. Groundwater wells should be mandatory for such hospitals, and empty spaces should be reserved within a mile range of hospitals to acco
Wikipedia geothermal_gradient#Heat_Sources, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... says the top heat producer on Earth is
Th232 3.27 × 10^-12 W/kg mantle, then
U238 2.91 × 10^-12 , and only then
K40 1.08 × 10^-12, and then
U235 0.125 × 10^-12.
We should always save a backup copy of the existing mosquitoes, just in case we mess up in unexpected ways and want to bring back the past. Even if something is horribly dangerous to humans, but not exterminatingly dangerous to humans, I think there is some right to exist. Like bears for instance. Bears are predators of humans, like mosquitoes are predators of humans. Even if I don't like mosquitoes, or even if I say I hate them, it doesn't mean I can't feel for them, or would agree to having them tortured - I think animal cruelty laws should apply to them too, unless the economics dictates otherwise. I still like bears, but it doesn't mean I want to meet with one in person, without me carrying a weapon, (or at least bear repellent spray, ha ha ha). Instead we should find a way to fend off mosquitoes from humans - spend all our efforts into scent deterrent agents, repellent sprays, so the mosquitoes have to feast on other mammals and reptiles and avians that preexisted before us on the planet. Without genetically engineering them. It's like we have the right to genetically engineer domesticated things, including cows and potatoes, but in the wilderness, the species out there have a right to their genetic identity, and I would only bring in GM as a last resort to keep a species from extinction, but not to drive one into extinction with it. The only things I'd drive to extinction are things like polio, but even that with a backup, as I'm sure there are plenty of backups of polio, anthrax, etc, around the world. You never know, some humanoid alien race might attack us, and our only chance might be unleashing one of these diseases, in case humans have a 35% chance survival, but the aliens only 2%.
There is the concept of privatized roads, but I personally try to avoid all toll roads and sometimes even highways unless I'm in a hurry, and instead I take a road trip and spectate the countryside, how people live, etc. You can learn a lot more about the state of the economy from a road trip than reading the news. I find the toll booths a nuisance, and I can see how toll road pricing could turn into a blackmailing situation, especially if there are no free alternatives. On the other hand I see lots and lots of road construction, and wonder whether it's wasting tax money, and politicians giving kickbacks to old friends, special contracts, at the expense of everyone else. The speed with which potholes develop is extreme, and I wonder if there were a better road that lasted longer. Private roads would find a better economic optimum, but they could blackmail the population for access. There are two sides to everything, the good side, and the bad side.
Farming has been automated, and this automation represents economics of scale, increased economic efficiency, however it leaves a ton of people urbanized, in need of a job, and buying this automated farm food on government aid. In a society where the government owns a lot of robots and productivity, and everyone, regardless of their economic status, gets a welfare check from the gov't to buy what the robots produce, and they can get a job on top of that to supplement this income, such automated farming is acceptable. However "designed by a steering committee", "gov't run enterprise" is hopelessly inefficient compared to private enterprise, as history has proven over and over, so the means of productivity including the robots will be privately owned, and then the private owner cannot be forced to send out welfare checks to the rest of the population so they get money to actually buy what he makes. There is this idea from Jefferson that a democracy's backbone is truly the yeoman farmer, because he's free from the corrupting influences of the city, where, somebody has to give him a job to feed himself, and nobody is forced to give anybody else a job, we can't just run to you for instance, and say here's this guy off the street and you must employ him - he'll comb your hair, cut your nails, clean your house, etc. You are like I like to do those things myself. You should say the same thing about growing your own food, that you like to do that too yourself, it's like almost a right to be self sufficient and secure first, and only participate in the economy with the excesses that you're able to produce. If you're self sufficient, you have enough food, clothing and shelter to make it through the year, without bills like utility, insurance, mortgage, high property taxes, then you don't give a flying feck about whether the economy is up or down, now it's up again, now it's down again, now we have a dragged out down we call recession or depression, you don't care because it doesn't affect you. If you have no bills to pay other than some minor property tax, make your own food, clothing, and shelter, you can go for years and decades without a job and still be happy. In fact that's how the caveman used to live, he took care of himself and paid no taxes to anyone, and still made it. The small tax is necessary for defense purposes, as the caveman had to conduct his own defense, but in today's world you can't fight UAV's by say, communist China with caveman axes. Taxes are very necessary for defense purposes, in fact that's pretty much the only thing Jefferson erred at, at having a too low a military budget , as the war of 1812 proved it. Education, social security, healthcare, etc, a bulk of that tax money could be eliminated and handled by the private enterprise alone. Well except social security for the elderly. Back in the old days we used to have company issued retirement benefits, assuming the company would still be in business when you retire, but cases like employment by LTV Steel, and by the City of Detroit shows that the retirement contracts cannot be relied on, for various reasons, because they cannot by the corporations issuing it, I just watched a video with Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, and they say we spend all these billions and billions on defense, when we could be spiritual and strive to live in peace. Yes, we should try by all means to live in peace, but we shouldn't be naive and assume nobody is gonna run us over if we completely eliminate our military budget.
Nuclear energy is by far the most profitable energy on the big business, macroeconomic scale, especially when you consider available reserves, and carbon emission/global warming issues. Unfortunately it has the safety issue side, as nuclear energy is so energy rich, a single terrorist event can wipe out entire cities. And I don't mean the small ones, but the biggest of the biggest cities. A weapon of such capability is unprecedented in the history of human warfare. So how we gonna live then, we must assume everyone is sane then, and nobody is willing to pull the trigger first under a mutually assured destruction scenario. Unfortunately evidence shows that there are lots of insane people out there, the jails have lots of violent murderers, who, when you listen to them will argue they had no choice but to commit something lest their image, or honor, or reputation, or mental tranquility and religious well being be upset and tarnished. As in "she was messin with my flo, so I knock the biatch the fuck out. dont nobody cross me like that, I aint gon let it happen, i aint goin down without a fight" Well, who the hell are you and what's the big deal with leaving your flow intact? And what's the big deal with going down without a fight? As a general trend such insane people don't end up at the top, but there are exceptions. History has quite a few insane leaders, like Nero burning Rom, shutting the gates of Rome and setting it on fire, so that he can find some poetic inspiration in the whole drama and compose some great literature and music. Those on top in in the US can't end up there or stay there without image, honor, reputation, etc, which requires active protection. Luckily we've had a culture of free speech/very first amendment rights, with SNL and Mad TV and the Tonight Show and David Letterman, etc., where we constantly tarnish the image, honor and reputation of our people at the top, but the jokes cannot be completely right, else those politicians lose their posts and are no longer politicians, which is not a big deal, we can always find more politicians, and it's better for them to leave office than engage in crazy things like Watergate coverups. It's a very subtle game, and though, compared to a monarch, with a dynasty holding a few hundred years in his view, our politicians might be shortsighted, hold no long term vision, because of their short stay in office, Washington was probably right, and politicians should be changed as often as diapers, for the same reasons. The brits and other places in the world go with monarchies, we go with democracies, we think our way is much better, but the nuclear threat wiping out all life on Earth looms, if another cold war develops, or at least the threat of creating a significant event with massive destruction by terrorists looms, but then the rest of us still survive, and life is both fragile but more resilient than a lot of people think, including being able to absorb and be poisoned by heavy doses of radiation and still recuperate and move on. Unfortunately we don't really have any other economically and environmentally sound alternative at the macro, big business scale, than nuclear energy.
The answer to the nuclear security issue, as everyone knows, is renewable energy. Renewable energy has all the benefits of and even tops nuclear energy when it comes to pollution, global warming carbon emissions, availability of long term fuel reserves, and most importantly, terrorist safety*(with an asterisk, as this is a subtle topic too.) The big problem on the macroeconomic scale is profitability, as renewable energy is the costliest of all energy forms, and profitability is pretty much the only thing that matters on the big business scale, so that makes renewable energy a moot point, a moot solution. It takes like 50,000 windmills to compensate for a single nuclear plant with a couple reactors. That's 50,000 windmills worth of copper or aluminum conduits, 50,000 windmills worth of surrounding empty acrerage, as windmills cannot be placed on top of each other but need spacing,
Also life even on this planet does not require a star, or light and photosynthesis, just a sufficiently high head, or "waterfall" of caloric, i.e. a large temperature gradient. See the Wikipedia page on Hydrothermal vent, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H....
A Dyson sphere might be radiating at 2.725 K, the microwave background temperature of the Universe, as the beings in it might have found a way to violate the 2nd law, via such things as a molecular ratchet, or brownian ratchet, and the Universe might be full of 2.725 K radiating things. The best way to hide a Dyson sphere is to make it the same temperature as the surroundings, and if it's not the same temperature, you may assume it's not a Dyson sphere.
As far as the warm temperature goes, we have to look at our own planet, and find out why the volcanic lava is hot, and it's because of K40 and U235 decay, and this goes for every massive object out there, including Jupiter and all the other planets, and this non-star.
As far as life beyond Earth is concerned, we think we know two things: it requires water in a liquid state, and be organic, carbon based, at least in its initial stages. Sufficiently advanced carbon might create self replicating silicon based life, robots enabled with artificial intelligence, not requiring any water or carbon to function, but in its formative stages we assume it would always be carbon based requiring liquid water. There are probably a gazillion places out there with liquid water - all you need is sufficient temperature, either from internal heat or from proximity to a star, or both, and sufficient gravity to hold the liquid water on the planet, and not let it evaporate and escape into outer space. The Earth might be at the low limit of the gravity range before water loss happens, but the high limit is probably very high, as ice becomes liquid under compression by a skate blade, and you need extraordinarily huge forces before it starts acting weird again, as a solid-like material, if it ever acts like one. I'm too lazy to look up these details right now, it's sufficient to say that life may be possible under huge gravity. Now gravity determines another important factor, and that is brain-size, as the sea has whales, but the land only has elephants as the biggest creatures, including brain size. Now brainsize alone is not a determining factor of intelligence, as there are many birds who can solve tasks that elephants and cows might have difficulty with, and we can explain that by interconnectedness principles - if you assume each connection between neurons to store 1 bit, instead of the neuron itself storing 1 bit, like cells on a chip or harddisk or cd presently do, out of 5 neurons, instead of 5 bits you can get the following combinations: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 23, 24, 25, 34, 35, 45, and also possibly 123, 124, 125, 134, 135, 234, etc and 1234, 1235, etc, with a lot more storage/processing space, if the combinatedness, connectedness is high. Building a neuron dendrite is costly, and probably each human neuron is not connected to 1 billion other neurons each, just, say 5 others, or 20 others, but an elephant might spend only on 5 dendrites, a bird might get 20, because a bird cannot afford to drag around a heavy brain while flying, but still needs a lot of visual processing power to see well from a distance. So size is not everything, but we can safely assume that a lifeform that's 10^-10 m size, or 1 angstrom size, or 0.1 nm, 0.0001 micrometer size does not exist, because that's the size of a single atom, and you gotta get more complicated than that to get life working. Also, while great buoyant lifeforms like octopuses and whales are possible floating in water, it is really difficult to develop things like metallurgy while immersed in water, and building of structures and using tools. Some octopuses will use tools, but pretty much all sea-life is a story of tiny fish being eaten by bigger fish being eaten by bigger fish being eaten by bigger fish, and not much else is going on, well, there are some mating rituals and dolphin communal gossiping, but having tentacles like humans do is a prerequisite to tool use. Even super-intelligent sea life might have a hard time with conducting chemical experiments, and modifying objects such as clothes, or weapons to hunt. So
I can solve the colonoscopy cheaper - buy a USB camera off ebay for 5 bux, and a handheld shower conduit, and DIY. It may not be as comfortable as the hospital one, as it may be hard to find small enough size cameras for the task, plus the led light takes up extra space, but you get what you pay for, and if you get more than you pay for, it's a deal!
I think I read somewhere that the inner core temperature of Jupiter is higher than it should be, and chemical engineering 101 says if heat out minus heat in not equal zero, then there is heat generated. The inner lava temperature of Earth is sustained mostly by K40 and U235 decay, besides minor asteroid impacts. So the inner temperature of Jupiter is also sustained probably by the same thing, and not fusion, as it is hard to imagine Jupiter without an iron-nickel core, and lava, and then a hydrogen atmosphere. Ditto for this "nonstar," it's hot for the same reasons that the inside of the Earth and Jupiter is hot, mostly K40 and U235.
With immortals, present people with booty on the mind turned immortal, reproducing out of control, the Earth is gonna be jam packed with people like anchovies in a can. If you have to go to the bathroom you will have to fight your way through a crowd, kind of like when you try to get from one end to another at a concert, except the whole world is gonna be like that, full of people. Only stupid people would create a world like that, but the reproduction issue and immortality go hand in hand.
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It does not mean they have "rest mass", but they do actually have "mass", m=E/c2, that should create gravity around the photon ( if gravity is such as thing that gets created and is present around an object, and it's not just a straight "instantaneous action at a distance" between two objects. now my head is starting to hurt)
Just because there are very few blood types out there, and it has something to do with heredity, it does not mean that there are only those few genetic variations of people, because within each blood type there are many different looking people out there - can you tell someone's blood type with high accuracy just by looking at a picture of their face? I don't think that's possible. Same goes for other genetic markers, such as mitochondrial DNA that strictly follows the maternal side. But life with bloodtype, just because your mitochondrial DNA is the same it does not mean you're closely related - well, it's a much tighter determining factor than blood type, but there are other things that matter too, such as the paternal side genes. Mitochondrial DNA only comes from the maternal side and you can trace ancestry along maternal sides that way, skin color, and beigeness, for instance, depends on both parents, and I think blood type does too. So good luck messing around with family trees and tracing your ancestry very far into the past. It's kind of hard to keep track of 9,007,199,254,740,992 different people 53 generations ago, especially the intricate inbreeding relationships when different generations slip in time against each other, and get out of sequence, so someone who's your great-great-great-great-grandfather's great-great-granddaughter might be your wife and you wouldn't even know it.
I have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, 32 great-great-great-grandparents, and so on. I was discussing a while ago that 53 generations ago (perhaps 1325=53*25 years ago, if a generation takes 25 years to cycle) I had 2^53=9,007,199,254,740,992 different ancestors, if there was no inbreeding. There was obviously some inbreeding, because even today there are only about 7,000,000,000 people on the planet, give or take. But amongst those 9,007,199,254,740,992 people 1325 years ago there is a high chance that some were from Europe, some from Africa, some from Asia, but there is a much lesser chance that some were Native Americans, or native Australians, or the now extinct, native Tasmanians. I probably share quite a bit of common ancestry with Native Americans too, probably even more than with subSaharan Africans, but it has to go back to a time before they crossed the Behring Strait between Siberia and Alaska, unless some intermixed with Eskimos up north, who in turn got around to the other continents and transported ancestry that way, after the Behring strait was crossed. My most distant relatives are probably the native Australians, but even they came from Africa less than 200,000 years ago, because that's when modern humans first appeared.
If they can pinpoint exactly which village you came from, then you have a severe inbreeding problem, because every village should have people from hundreds of other villages, and such variation shouldn't be duplicated from village to village, so on a country level, out of say 10-50 million people you're probably talking at least half a million different villages they could have come from. Everyone's unique, everyone has a different fingerprint - unless they are genetically identical twins. People will sometimes prefer their very own kind, but sometimes someone very distant as an inbreeding fighting measure. Who you find physically attractive is a very subtle process, as you both are responsible for yourself first, then your family, then your kind, but you have to protect yourself, your family and your kind from inbreeding defects too. Everyone is responsible for themselves, if you take care of yourself, then I don't have to, you're helping me out a lot by taking care of yourself. If you take care of your family and kids, then I don't have to, you're helping me out a lot again. If you take care of your own kind, then I don't have to, you're helping me out a lot again. Am I my brother's keeper? Sometimes I cannot afford to be. I cannot expect you to care about someone else's children more, or even equally, to how you care about your own. If you disagree, we have a whole lot of court cases where paternity issues are fought, and all you gotta do is show up and offer that they don't need to fight in court, because you will accept the child support deductions from your paycheck, for millions of cases that happen. Or if you cannot accept a million deductions, just do one such case. Chances are you will not go for it, and be altruistic like that to a random stranger. Most people that adopt a child as their own, they don't just get a paycheck deduction, but they get human contact out of it, so in a sense it's selfish. However there are lots of catholic charities that collect donations for say, kids in the Philippines, and the people get a picture of the child in exchange, but you can only do that if you take care of your own turf first, I also cannot expect you to care more about me, than yourself. Though there are martyrs, heroes, kamikaze's, who will take care of their kind before taking care of themselves, but in a sense they are taking care of themselves better by taking care of their kind, than if they took care of themselves themselves. Your ultimate kind is human, and we could even get as specieist as saying that we'd be willing to see every other creature and species disappear if that saved humans, but we would probably not be racist enough to say that we'd be willing to see every other human race disappear to save our own, or every o
Also, while some bumble-bees and wild strains of bees have very low family sizes, most domesticated bee hives have on the order of 50,000 individuals, which creates a society a lot more complex than the natural "hive-size" for ape or human societies. Humans have the mental capacity to handle on the order of 200-800 people at once, and there are very few villages around the globe that have larger sizes than that. Cities arose only in advanced stages of civilization, such as Babylon, but the bulk of the population used to be rural up until a century ago, and only recently have humans become mainly urbanized. Even with local market-town cities where the various villages interact and exchange goods, ideas and non-inbreeding genes, the moral code and ethics is still dominated by the villages and cities are oppressed by it. Under such circumstances, with everyone's hive limited to 200 or so people, crime is very low. Even inside cities people naturally develop hives of that size that interact dynamically with each other on many fronts, but those cities that lack mechanisms for such 200 person collectives - be it a prison environment, a mental institution, or even a steady job - probably have a lot of crime. One wonders how ants and bees have the mental capacity to handle societies of tens of thousands of individuals, and the common answer is that they don't, they only have the "scent" capacity, semaphores and signals that trigger automatic behavior that they are unable to go against. Not following the law, such as crossing a red light, is genetically impossible for ants, termites and bees, but it's very easy for humans to do, laws and rights and police are smoke and mirrors when it comes to humans or even dogs, and only the village is able to beat everyone into submission. Though there are crazy people who cannot be helped no matter what and instead we lock them up to keep everyone else safe from them, the bulk of the crime committed is a failure of a village, and cannot be blamed on economic conditions, because there are lots of extremely poor but well functioning villages around the world with zero crime.
The queen's gotta be an exception to the defecation flight requirement, as she only leaves the hive when mating, as mating has to happen out in the open, and only the drones that can chase the queen real high, and do acrobatic maneuvers with her, get to mate with her. Blind drones, defective drones, or unskilled drones at flying don't get very far, as it's very important for the next generation of worker bees to have good navigation and flying abilities. After mating a drone falls to a glorious death. So the queen probably never leaves the hive for defecation, and it must be the attendant bees that feed her the royal jelly that somehow handle her excrement and transport it outside. Also once a queen is failing, such as has run out of sperm reserves after 2 years or so, or lays an inadequate crop of eggs, or who knows what kind of complex reasons, including disturbing pesticides meddling in the decision making process of bees, she may get "balled" and suffocated by her attendants, who, by creating an absence of a queen, and her royal scent decaying from the hive in a matter of hours, automatically drive the rest of the workers to enlarge some existing worker cells, and create new queen candidates, which will fight to the death when they emerge, until one is left. If the workers don't succeed in rearing a new queen, such as all the worker larvae are at too an advanced stage to be fed royal jelly and be turned into queens, or the few queens that do emerge are unable to take the nuptual flight because of bad weather or various other reasons, so after days and weeks of not having a queen or royal scent present in the hive, all the female worker bees' ovaries develop and all of them start laying eggs, but they lack sperm reserves, or biological equipment to store sperm at all, and without sperm every new bee hatchling is a useless drone, and without a functioning queen the whole hive is doomed, because she's the only one who can lay female worker bee eggs, by voluntarily choosing whether to fertilize an egg, or not, and by choosing not to fertilize an egg, she lays a drone, on purpose. How many drones to lay is a very complex decision. But complex decisions is what queen bees are good at..
Actually it still exists, I recently bought 5 1/4" floppies with specifically MS DOS 6.20 on them, as they contain patent infringing Doublespace on them, as opposed to the later released non-infringing Drivespace in MS DOS 6.22. Microsoft paid millions in infringement damages to the appropriate company as a result of the lawsuit, however as Feb 1994 has been over 20 years ago, and patents last only 20 years from the date of filing (used to be 17 years from the date of approval, which resulted in delay tactics of over 10 years or more from date of filing just to get approval as late as possible, and extend the effective patent protection period), so Feb 2014 was 20 years from Feb 1994, the release of MS DOS 6.20, so the patent had to have expired, no matter what, by then. So you're free to use DoubleSpace again, these days. You never know which one is better, Drivespace or Doublespace, as bees don't know which genes are the correct ones in defending against future threats, and create as much genetic variability as possible through creating expensive but otherwise useless drones. They are so expensive to create, keep up and maintain, that sometimes it's not worth it, and end of October/November they get tossed outside the hive by the female workers, and left to die, as they can't take care of themselves. The females will in turn create new drones when Spring is here, but economize the honey stores only on workers and the queen that take care of the hive, and do useful work. Their moral conduct is also to hold in their excrement for the entire winter, and only when spring is here will they have their defecation flights. You never shit inside the hive if you're a bee, it would take too much effort to clean it up, you also can't do it next to the hive, you gotta go some distance before your code of ethics relating to defecation permits such a thing to happen.
So what if you want to prolong the lifetime of an SSD's, and want to use it as a long term backup storage medium that you can bury in your backyard, and only dig it out once a decade to update? Also a decade later writable SSD's may no longer be available, so as you have no clue how many writes and rewrites you will do in the future, what's an efficient strategy, an optimum %fill on these drives? As the future is unknown, you cannot predict this accurately, but it's certainly not 99.9% full, and not 0.01% full, so is 80% filling policy, or 95% or 99.8% fill policy and according purchase of capacity a good strategy?
Exactly - these drives are almost read-only drives, you can write to them a few thousand times, but you should avoid writing to them at all cost, consider them kinda like CD-R's. As they are chip based, and come with built-in wifi, anything you write to them inside a city or anywhere there is wifi present, will be sent through the subliminal wifi network to the powers that be. The only secure way to write to these is in the middle of the desert with nobody around for 100's of miles (but you still got the satellites watching you) or in a deep underground cavern or mine where all electromagnetic (including satellite) waves are blocked out (it's not safe to masturbate in the desert because you can be caught on satellite camera and be posted all over the internet, a mineshaft or deep underwater in a submarine is a lot safer place to do it). You have to be careful with the timestamps though, and stick to something like year 2005 in your computer bios, as there might be a zero day code built into the chip that erases everything in, say, year 2050, then self destructs. Even if you watch your timestamps, the device may have its own clock regardless, and know when 2050 is here even if you don't tell it. The way to deal with that is to "starve" the device of any residual capacitive storage to run a clock from, say freezing it for 20-40 years, at which point its own internal clock should give out due to lack of capacitive battery power and stop counting the progress of time, and when 2050 hits, some of these devices will self destruct, but the deep frozen ones will be behind on their internal clock, and the data can be rescued from them before they self-destruct too. The only secure longterm storage mediums are non-chip based, such as magnetic (floppies, tape) or optical (cd-rw(cr-r ink decays over time or bacteria can chew it up, CDRW is a molten semimetal glass (fuckin telluride, telluride is only found where gold is found, or with high probability only there, and it's super rare, or super dispersed in the environment, hard to extract and get your hands on it), that's only temperature sensitive, but not good food like ink is good food), dvd, etc.) As long as they can't create logic inside magnetic materials, such as magnetic transistors, etc, the data can be kept separated from the logic that acts on it, and there is never a danger of self activating zero day self destruct behavior. By the way floppies have the head rubbing against the disk, and only teflon based floppies should be used. Harddrives have a tiny air-cushion, bernoulli-effect-like, so there is no contact, they are also dust-free, unfortunately they are chip-based, and because of that are not secure. Ideally they should make "removable disk" harddrives, where you can remove the spindle and exchange it between drives, like you can floppies, however the powers that be might want to retain that only for themselves or their military, and the general public only get SSD's, chipped harddrives, chipped flash drives, or floppies and cdrw's. Out of all CDRW's are the best option for Jefferson's yeomans, and not DVD-RW's, as the biggest issue with CD's is head alignment. I used to work at an electronics repair shop as a front desk attendant, and the standard chime I uttered every time someone tried to bring in a CD-player for repair was: "The laser assembly is out of alignment - it costs $80 for a new laser assembly, and you only paid $40 for the CD-player, (or fill in the value, 39, or 44, how much was it? 52? you got ripped off, circuit city sells them for 39 every holiday). So what you wanna do, buy another CD or DVD player, or you want us to look at it and repair it, and charge you the diagnosis fee too?" The laser assembly is always out of alignment, it's always out of friggin alignment, so that brings you back to floppies, the bigger and lower density the better, 80KB 8" being the best, least head alignment or magnetic material error sensitive. Floppies you may also be able to self-produce, and then their short lifetime is not an issue. Having 80KB storage is a whole who
The danger of this may be the reason for the coming apocalypse and technological decline, as God may prefer going back to horses as power sources and monks doing handwriting, as opposed to creating all digesting nanomachines, the way we're headed these days. However the technological descent should be smoothed out a bit, as you should try to save some existing computers and run them for as many hundred years as they will go, before running out of them and being stuck with handwriting only.
Silicon based life might be robots with an artificial intelligence computers, and they need to eat nothing, as they have solar panels to produce electricity directly from sunlight, and are able to live in the vacuum of outer space. If sunlight is not available, then they can use nuclear reactions to produce electricity to power themselves with in the dark.
Glass is already dephlogisticated silicon, but silicon full of phlogiston has been suggested as a commodity energy carrier. On the plus side it's ubiquitous, being the second most common element on Earth after oxygen, but it's not easy to react it back and forth, unless we can find a way, such as an organic fluid with a high redox potential window able to digest solid silicon, and good luck with that, otherwise solid silicon reactions require very high temperatures. The hydride is more reactive, but then storage becomes an issue. There is an optimum balance between storage nonreactivity, and energy conversion ease of reactivity, and gasoline might be a bit on the danger side of ease, but it's the best thing we got as an energy carrier right now. The much more scarce boron has many benefits compared to silicon, but it's very toxic to all chitin based life, and it also has issues of reactivity, but the borohydrides might be pretty usable. Both silicon and boron produce dephlogisticated ash that's a show stopper for car use, unless you toss the ash up in the air like old steam locomotives used to, and spread it all over the cars behind you, in which case boron cannot be but silicon might be. This ash production is opposite of hydrocarbons and ammonia producing only dephlogisticated airs, which can be freely emitted from a car.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... of the 4.6 billion years that the Earth has been circling the Sun, life has been present for 3.6 billion years as single celled organisms, and only 1 billion years ago did multicellular organisms appear, including all visible life-forms, such as plants, animals, etc, 600 million years ago simple animals, only 130 million years ago flowers (flowering trees taking over most lowland forest areas pushing nonflowering conifers up the mountains, btw every flower means a bug, as it's colored to attract a bug as a reproductive vector, and not hose the environment with a gazillion spores like conifers do), and only 20 million years ago great apes, and only 200,000 years ago modern humans, out of Africa. All these multicellular lifeforms, without exception, are inhabited by single celled organisms in symbiotic ways. The variety in single celled lifeforms is tremendous, and so it is in multicellular lifeforms. It is strange that after all this time no single victorious, monopolistic entity arose, such as a uniform, dominant species, a most efficient, most proliferating single celled life form digesting anything and everything around it, but instead genetic variability seems to be actively maintained. Genetic variability is the answer to unknown problems, as if you know what the actual problem or challenge is gonna be, you can choose an optimal solution, but when the problem is unknown, such as the appearance of a new smart predator with unknown tricks, it's not possible to predict what the problems will be, and the next best thing is to provide variety hoping that at least something will make it. The natural progress of things is usually that the rich get richer the poor get poorer, the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker, monopolies naturally arise and dominate and exterminate everything else, but being a mono-culture, they are vulnerable along the lines of the potato-as-most-efficient crop being a mono-culture created the Irish potato famine, so against this natural trend of coalescing toward a vulnerable top dog monopoly situation, there is this active sustenance of variability and keeping anything from becoming a monopoly, you can call it intelligent design, as an external agent meddling with things, or you can say that the bacteria themselves are intelligent(some have rotors) and retain control of multicellular lifeforms including humans, and they meddle in the affairs of humans through mind control, presenting prophecies, test and check human reactions with dreams, create and manage hallucinations, and try to create and sustain variety and balance of power among different lifeforms, and even different human cultures, such as making Joan of Arc put an end to the 100 year war and sustaining the balance of power in the monarchies of Europe, not letting the British crown or later Napoleon take over all power. They are also not omnipotent because they could not save Joan from the fire, from the desperate desire of the clergy to witness a miracle(she has already fulfilled her function), and they stopped messing with prophecies after Mohamed the last prophet of God, as nobody, nobody knows the future, any intellect has some predictive power, such as a cat or monkey able to predict whether a jump from a tree branch will succeed, that's what a brain is for, but having no clue about what happens 10 years from now. Once a prophecy is created it takes a whole lot of effort to fulfill it, and it's not worth it sometimes, and life has to adapt to the new circumstances and forget about the prophecies. New prophecies should be taken as guidelines, but with the understanding that life has to adapt to whatever new circumstances arise. Btw. life may have extraterrestrial origins starting 3.6 billion years ago, and when we terraform Venus, as that is the only planet with the right size for us, not Mars, so we might start with single celled lifeforms to reduce greenhouse effects there, and put an adjustable umbrella b
There was actually some major spy case with data being stored in unused areas of the floppies. As most harddrives and USB key-chain drives are chip-based, and the only chip you can trust is the one that you make, floppies are secure in the sense that they isolate data storage from the logic that could do anything with it. And once one logic fails, such as a floppy drive, you have the option to carry the floppy from it to a different floppy disk but you cannot do that with a harddisk. Optical disks can also be separated from the logic, however the ink based CD-Rs degrade fast over time, but not the RW kind base, calchogenide glass, which does not degrade. I wish they invented some chalcogen glasses that are not scarce-material based. The biggest issue with floppies is constant mechanical wear as the read-write magnetic head touches the disk surface with a given pressure, but because of the low density, floppy head movement errors are tolerable, unlike with optical disks, where tiny laser-head misalignments create a failed read.
I'm a half-ass vegetarian. I don't actively try to eat meat, but I don't have a problem with it, as long as other people have to do the dirty work of killing the meat for food. I'd have a really hard time looking a cow or chicken into the eye, and telling it sorry buddy, you're lunch, as long as there are other things without eyes or a central nervous system to eat, such as chicken eggs for proteins. In dire economic circumstances and heavy hunger it would be easier to look a cow or chicken or deer in the eye and just do it, so one measure of one's luxury is how vegetarian can be afford to be? How much morality can you afford for yourself?Really rich Rajah's in old India could afford to hire people to sweep the ground before them so they don't accidentally step on a bug, and harm another conscious being with eyes and a central nervous system.
Nuclear power is all about safety and security, which are or should be the costliest items on the budget, the fuel is relatively cheap, and processing would be cheap too if it weren't for the safety and security issues. Doing it large-scale in high security lock down zones enhances safety, as opposed to, as the above poster says, trying to keep track of lots of mini-reactors being shipped to many places, fueling hospitals and such, all over the place, getting stolen/lost/loaded on an airplaine and slammed into a building in NY 9/11 style. When there are too many mobile reactors, keeping track of them becomes difficult, and the safety risks are huge. All civil nuclear power should be non-mobile as a first rule. Any nuclear material leaving a high security facility on a train or an arm-guard-cash-truck or in any way is a safety issue.
But there is a need for mobile small scale nuclear power, the most important example being military submarines, which simply cannot function on diesel, as they have to get oxygen from the air, and their tactical situation may require deep underground stays for weeks at a time. Also nuclear fuel needs recharging only every few years, as opposed to every other week with diesel. That's a very important military consideration, as half of all military issues relate to logistics, and supply of materials to the battlefronts. Only nuclear power makes sense for a submarine, and it has to be mobile and small scale. The logistics issue of bi-weekly diesel fuel deliveries also requires carriers to be nuclear powered, needing only a biannual refueling. Do we really need submarines and carriers? Yes. As long as you have a military, sea power is essential, and the battleship is obsoleted by both the airplane carrier and the submarine. Small scale mobile nuclear reactors are an absolute necessity for submarines, not as much a necessity but a very good idea for carriers, and I would even go as far as saying it might also make sense in the future for military airplanes of the slow, long-haul freight kind, which are big like a submarine, and similar but air cooled units could be used in both. Having freight airplanes with guaranteed uptime/availability regardless of availability of diesel can be a lifesaver in the future is diesel prices hit over $20/gal, and the world gets militarily tense over that high price. I mean the $20 in year 2000 US dollar values, not in an inflation world, where, if minimum wage hits $380/hr, and monthly rent is 38,000, and the Dow Jones is at 1,400,000, then $20/gal wouldn't be a big deal, would it.
Besides the military, there are very few civilian requirements for small scale mobile nuclear units, a major hospital being maybe the only such example. A major hospital of at least a certain size should service every area of the country as a last resort to send patients to if power fails to the whole region of the country including the branch hospitals and the major hospital itself. A major hospital should have reserve batteries to last at least 20 minutes, then reserve diesel to last two weeks (when electricity goes out natural gas may still be available indefinitely, so generators based on that should be run before diesel stores are touched, (the same generator should be able to run both diesel and natural gas), but if both electric and natural gas is lost then you need), with ability to request the military to deliver one of these or a couple of these air-cooled airplane-engine units in a high security, heavy military defended way, operated by military personnel until power connections to regular power plants can be reestablished, or if not, indefinitely guarded. The air cooled part is what would take up 95% of space, the reactor itself being very small, as availability of water cooling cannot be guaranteed, the hospital may be lucky to sustain its water supply from local wells, if the water-pipeline/sewer infrastructure also fails. Groundwater wells should be mandatory for such hospitals, and empty spaces should be reserved within a mile range of hospitals to acco
Wikipedia geothermal_gradient#Heat_Sources, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... says the top heat producer on Earth is
Th232 3.27 × 10^-12 W/kg mantle, then
U238 2.91 × 10^-12 , and only then
K40 1.08 × 10^-12, and then
U235 0.125 × 10^-12.
We should always save a backup copy of the existing mosquitoes, just in case we mess up in unexpected ways and want to bring back the past. Even if something is horribly dangerous to humans, but not exterminatingly dangerous to humans, I think there is some right to exist. Like bears for instance. Bears are predators of humans, like mosquitoes are predators of humans. Even if I don't like mosquitoes, or even if I say I hate them, it doesn't mean I can't feel for them, or would agree to having them tortured - I think animal cruelty laws should apply to them too, unless the economics dictates otherwise. I still like bears, but it doesn't mean I want to meet with one in person, without me carrying a weapon, (or at least bear repellent spray, ha ha ha). Instead we should find a way to fend off mosquitoes from humans - spend all our efforts into scent deterrent agents, repellent sprays, so the mosquitoes have to feast on other mammals and reptiles and avians that preexisted before us on the planet. Without genetically engineering them. It's like we have the right to genetically engineer domesticated things, including cows and potatoes, but in the wilderness, the species out there have a right to their genetic identity, and I would only bring in GM as a last resort to keep a species from extinction, but not to drive one into extinction with it. The only things I'd drive to extinction are things like polio, but even that with a backup, as I'm sure there are plenty of backups of polio, anthrax, etc, around the world. You never know, some humanoid alien race might attack us, and our only chance might be unleashing one of these diseases, in case humans have a 35% chance survival, but the aliens only 2%.
There is the concept of privatized roads, but I personally try to avoid all toll roads and sometimes even highways unless I'm in a hurry, and instead I take a road trip and spectate the countryside, how people live, etc. You can learn a lot more about the state of the economy from a road trip than reading the news. I find the toll booths a nuisance, and I can see how toll road pricing could turn into a blackmailing situation, especially if there are no free alternatives. On the other hand I see lots and lots of road construction, and wonder whether it's wasting tax money, and politicians giving kickbacks to old friends, special contracts, at the expense of everyone else. The speed with which potholes develop is extreme, and I wonder if there were a better road that lasted longer. Private roads would find a better economic optimum, but they could blackmail the population for access. There are two sides to everything, the good side, and the bad side.
Farming has been automated, and this automation represents economics of scale, increased economic efficiency, however it leaves a ton of people urbanized, in need of a job, and buying this automated farm food on government aid. In a society where the government owns a lot of robots and productivity, and everyone, regardless of their economic status, gets a welfare check from the gov't to buy what the robots produce, and they can get a job on top of that to supplement this income, such automated farming is acceptable. However "designed by a steering committee", "gov't run enterprise" is hopelessly inefficient compared to private enterprise, as history has proven over and over, so the means of productivity including the robots will be privately owned, and then the private owner cannot be forced to send out welfare checks to the rest of the population so they get money to actually buy what he makes. There is this idea from Jefferson that a democracy's backbone is truly the yeoman farmer, because he's free from the corrupting influences of the city, where, somebody has to give him a job to feed himself, and nobody is forced to give anybody else a job, we can't just run to you for instance, and say here's this guy off the street and you must employ him - he'll comb your hair, cut your nails, clean your house, etc. You are like I like to do those things myself. You should say the same thing about growing your own food, that you like to do that too yourself, it's like almost a right to be self sufficient and secure first, and only participate in the economy with the excesses that you're able to produce. If you're self sufficient, you have enough food, clothing and shelter to make it through the year, without bills like utility, insurance, mortgage, high property taxes, then you don't give a flying feck about whether the economy is up or down, now it's up again, now it's down again, now we have a dragged out down we call recession or depression, you don't care because it doesn't affect you. If you have no bills to pay other than some minor property tax, make your own food, clothing, and shelter, you can go for years and decades without a job and still be happy. In fact that's how the caveman used to live, he took care of himself and paid no taxes to anyone, and still made it. The small tax is necessary for defense purposes, as the caveman had to conduct his own defense, but in today's world you can't fight UAV's by say, communist China with caveman axes. Taxes are very necessary for defense purposes, in fact that's pretty much the only thing Jefferson erred at, at having a too low a military budget , as the war of 1812 proved it. Education, social security, healthcare, etc, a bulk of that tax money could be eliminated and handled by the private enterprise alone. Well except social security for the elderly. Back in the old days we used to have company issued retirement benefits, assuming the company would still be in business when you retire, but cases like employment by LTV Steel, and by the City of Detroit shows that the retirement contracts cannot be relied on, for various reasons, because they cannot by the corporations issuing it, I just watched a video with Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, and they say we spend all these billions and billions on defense, when we could be spiritual and strive to live in peace. Yes, we should try by all means to live in peace, but we shouldn't be naive and assume nobody is gonna run us over if we completely eliminate our military budget.
Nuclear energy is by far the most profitable energy on the big business, macroeconomic scale, especially when you consider available reserves, and carbon emission/global warming issues. Unfortunately it has the safety issue side, as nuclear energy is so energy rich, a single terrorist event can wipe out entire cities. And I don't mean the small ones, but the biggest of the biggest cities. A weapon of such capability is unprecedented in the history of human warfare. So how we gonna live then, we must assume everyone is sane then, and nobody is willing to pull the trigger first under a mutually assured destruction scenario. Unfortunately evidence shows that there are lots of insane people out there, the jails have lots of violent murderers, who, when you listen to them will argue they had no choice but to commit something lest their image, or honor, or reputation, or mental tranquility and religious well being be upset and tarnished. As in "she was messin with my flo, so I knock the biatch the fuck out. dont nobody cross me like that, I aint gon let it happen, i aint goin down without a fight" Well, who the hell are you and what's the big deal with leaving your flow intact? And what's the big deal with going down without a fight? As a general trend such insane people don't end up at the top, but there are exceptions. History has quite a few insane leaders, like Nero burning Rom, shutting the gates of Rome and setting it on fire, so that he can find some poetic inspiration in the whole drama and compose some great literature and music. Those on top in in the US can't end up there or stay there without image, honor, reputation, etc, which requires active protection. Luckily we've had a culture of free speech/very first amendment rights, with SNL and Mad TV and the Tonight Show and David Letterman, etc., where we constantly tarnish the image, honor and reputation of our people at the top, but the jokes cannot be completely right, else those politicians lose their posts and are no longer politicians, which is not a big deal, we can always find more politicians, and it's better for them to leave office than engage in crazy things like Watergate coverups. It's a very subtle game, and though, compared to a monarch, with a dynasty holding a few hundred years in his view, our politicians might be shortsighted, hold no long term vision, because of their short stay in office, Washington was probably right, and politicians should be changed as often as diapers, for the same reasons. The brits and other places in the world go with monarchies, we go with democracies, we think our way is much better, but the nuclear threat wiping out all life on Earth looms, if another cold war develops, or at least the threat of creating a significant event with massive destruction by terrorists looms, but then the rest of us still survive, and life is both fragile but more resilient than a lot of people think, including being able to absorb and be poisoned by heavy doses of radiation and still recuperate and move on. Unfortunately we don't really have any other economically and environmentally sound alternative at the macro, big business scale, than nuclear energy.
The answer to the nuclear security issue, as everyone knows, is renewable energy. Renewable energy has all the benefits of and even tops nuclear energy when it comes to pollution, global warming carbon emissions, availability of long term fuel reserves, and most importantly, terrorist safety*(with an asterisk, as this is a subtle topic too.) The big problem on the macroeconomic scale is profitability, as renewable energy is the costliest of all energy forms, and profitability is pretty much the only thing that matters on the big business scale, so that makes renewable energy a moot point, a moot solution. It takes like 50,000 windmills to compensate for a single nuclear plant with a couple reactors. That's 50,000 windmills worth of copper or aluminum conduits, 50,000 windmills worth of surrounding empty acrerage, as windmills cannot be placed on top of each other but need spacing,
Also life even on this planet does not require a star, or light and photosynthesis, just a sufficiently high head, or "waterfall" of caloric, i.e. a large temperature gradient. See the Wikipedia page on Hydrothermal vent, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H....
A Dyson sphere might be radiating at 2.725 K, the microwave background temperature of the Universe, as the beings in it might have found a way to violate the 2nd law, via such things as a molecular ratchet, or brownian ratchet, and the Universe might be full of 2.725 K radiating things. The best way to hide a Dyson sphere is to make it the same temperature as the surroundings, and if it's not the same temperature, you may assume it's not a Dyson sphere.
As far as the warm temperature goes, we have to look at our own planet, and find out why the volcanic lava is hot, and it's because of K40 and U235 decay, and this goes for every massive object out there, including Jupiter and all the other planets, and this non-star.
As far as life beyond Earth is concerned, we think we know two things: it requires water in a liquid state, and be organic, carbon based, at least in its initial stages. Sufficiently advanced carbon might create self replicating silicon based life, robots enabled with artificial intelligence, not requiring any water or carbon to function, but in its formative stages we assume it would always be carbon based requiring liquid water. There are probably a gazillion places out there with liquid water - all you need is sufficient temperature, either from internal heat or from proximity to a star, or both, and sufficient gravity to hold the liquid water on the planet, and not let it evaporate and escape into outer space. The Earth might be at the low limit of the gravity range before water loss happens, but the high limit is probably very high, as ice becomes liquid under compression by a skate blade, and you need extraordinarily huge forces before it starts acting weird again, as a solid-like material, if it ever acts like one. I'm too lazy to look up these details right now, it's sufficient to say that life may be possible under huge gravity. Now gravity determines another important factor, and that is brain-size, as the sea has whales, but the land only has elephants as the biggest creatures, including brain size. Now brainsize alone is not a determining factor of intelligence, as there are many birds who can solve tasks that elephants and cows might have difficulty with, and we can explain that by interconnectedness principles - if you assume each connection between neurons to store 1 bit, instead of the neuron itself storing 1 bit, like cells on a chip or harddisk or cd presently do, out of 5 neurons, instead of 5 bits you can get the following combinations: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 23, 24, 25, 34, 35, 45, and also possibly 123, 124, 125, 134, 135, 234, etc and 1234, 1235, etc, with a lot more storage/processing space, if the combinatedness, connectedness is high. Building a neuron dendrite is costly, and probably each human neuron is not connected to 1 billion other neurons each, just, say 5 others, or 20 others, but an elephant might spend only on 5 dendrites, a bird might get 20, because a bird cannot afford to drag around a heavy brain while flying, but still needs a lot of visual processing power to see well from a distance. So size is not everything, but we can safely assume that a lifeform that's 10^-10 m size, or 1 angstrom size, or 0.1 nm, 0.0001 micrometer size does not exist, because that's the size of a single atom, and you gotta get more complicated than that to get life working. Also, while great buoyant lifeforms like octopuses and whales are possible floating in water, it is really difficult to develop things like metallurgy while immersed in water, and building of structures and using tools. Some octopuses will use tools, but pretty much all sea-life is a story of tiny fish being eaten by bigger fish being eaten by bigger fish being eaten by bigger fish, and not much else is going on, well, there are some mating rituals and dolphin communal gossiping, but having tentacles like humans do is a prerequisite to tool use. Even super-intelligent sea life might have a hard time with conducting chemical experiments, and modifying objects such as clothes, or weapons to hunt. So
I can solve the colonoscopy cheaper - buy a USB camera off ebay for 5 bux, and a handheld shower conduit, and DIY. It may not be as comfortable as the hospital one, as it may be hard to find small enough size cameras for the task, plus the led light takes up extra space, but you get what you pay for, and if you get more than you pay for, it's a deal!
I think I read somewhere that the inner core temperature of Jupiter is higher than it should be, and chemical engineering 101 says if heat out minus heat in not equal zero, then there is heat generated. The inner lava temperature of Earth is sustained mostly by K40 and U235 decay, besides minor asteroid impacts. So the inner temperature of Jupiter is also sustained probably by the same thing, and not fusion, as it is hard to imagine Jupiter without an iron-nickel core, and lava, and then a hydrogen atmosphere. Ditto for this "nonstar," it's hot for the same reasons that the inside of the Earth and Jupiter is hot, mostly K40 and U235.
With immortals, present people with booty on the mind turned immortal, reproducing out of control, the Earth is gonna be jam packed with people like anchovies in a can. If you have to go to the bathroom you will have to fight your way through a crowd, kind of like when you try to get from one end to another at a concert, except the whole world is gonna be like that, full of people. Only stupid people would create a world like that, but the reproduction issue and immortality go hand in hand.